New performance capture tech makes photorealistic skin a reality

Newsbrief: A team of researchers from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Imperial College London have developed a new performance capture technique that will allow developers to capture the intricate subtleties of human skin, going a long way to making CGI characters indistinguishable from their human counterparts.

Unveiled at Siggraph 2015, the team uses a 10-micron resolution scanning technique to capture minute patches of an actor's skin, measuring how it is stretched and compressed in different directions. At that point, the data can be mapped onto character models, creating CGI characters unlike anything we've ever seen.